Earlier this month MSI launched the companies AMD Radeon HD 7970 based Lightning series video card, the R7970 Lightning. The MSI R7970 Lighting is clocked at 1070 MHz on the core and 1400 MHz on the memory (5600 MHz effective). This is an impressive 15.7% clock increase on the core and a mediocre 1.8% on the memory. Read on to see how this $599 video card performs against the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680 and take a look at how far we overclocked it!

Overclocking the MSI R7970 Lighting was a blast and the fact that we could take it from 1070 MHz on the core all the way up to 1275 MHz was impressive. AMD released the Radeon HD 7970 with a 925 MHz core clock, so this is a 350 MHz overclock on the core! This card was really fun to overclock on air, so we can only imagine what those with LN2 pots will be able to hit!